Say Yes to Anxiety: a cross-country indie experiment in Edmonton

Last May, six of the country’s most adventurous small-scale indie companies, experimenters all, Halifax to Victoria, received a mysterious package in the mail. What the deliveries had in common was a return address — Theatre Yes, Edmonton AB — and an invitation to create Anxiety for, and possibly in, an audience.
Each contained an artifact, along with poetic notes, enigmatic instructions, journal fragments. Each package was different.

Last May, six of the country’s most adventurous small-scale indie companies, experimenters all, Halifax to Victoria, received a mysterious package in the mail.

Each contained an artifact, along with poetic notes, enigmatic instructions, journal fragments. Each package was different.

Edmonton’s Northern Light Theatre, for example, got a glass candy bowl, lined with a lace doily, full of teeth. In Montreal, Théâtre à corps perdus found a tin of shortbread cookies and a leather pouch containing a flash drive with a surveillance tape. In Victoria, Theatre SKAM opened a cigar box to discover a cellphone set up with cryptic messages and codes, and hints of an owner from another time.

What the deliveries had in common was a return address — Theatre Yes, Edmonton AB —and an invitation to create Anxiety for, and possibly in, an audience. How stressful is that?

Northern Light Theatre received the candy dish full of teeth as part of Anxiety.dbphotographics

Theatre Yes artistic director Heather Inglis, who regularly says No to the conventional separation of theatre and audience, explains the outbreak of Anxiety happening nightly in a “secret location” starting Thursday, Nov. 24. Theatre Yes asked each company to commission a 10-minute “immersive performance installation” inspired, if not cued, by the mail delivery — with the idea of exploring anxiety, the escalating, uncontainable epidemic of our time, impinging on our lives, even shaping them, in contortionist ways.

The only requirement was “a live performance aspect,” says Inglis. The only constraint was a two-actor maximum.

“Companies responded to our prompts in a variety of ways,” says Inglis of the concept she and actor Murray Cullen devised. “Some created what you might call a ‘play’; some, an ‘experience’.” Some are fully written; some are largely improvised. There are, after all, big differences in style, sensibility, and work habits between, say, LoHiFi Productions, a “puppet object company” that once installed a large glowing jellyfish over Halifax Harbour,and Victoria’s site-specific Theatre SKAM, with its annual summer SKAMpede festival where people travel between shows on bikes.

Edmonton playwright Cat Walsh (The Laws of Thermodynamics), whose own muse is dark and comic, created a backstory to frame Anxiety, and put its pan-Canadian sextet of immersive pieces together. The notable sound artist Gary James Joynes designed a score. And copious Skype sessions later, the six guest companiesare gathering in Edmonton to install and perform their original creations.

Where? I hear you ask (anxiously). “Different rooms in a mystery space,” is all Inglis will say. As you’ll know if you discovered theatre happening in a selection of downtown elevators during The Elevator Project, Theatre Yes delights in the surprise of unexpected theatre venues. All we know in advance, my anxious friends, is that we’ll assemble at La Cité francophone and go … somewhere.

“Anxiety is fear plus time,” says Inglis of the birth of her inspiration 18 months ago. “Fight or flight is becoming a way of life. Hyper-polarized politics, failing economy, climate change. The Internet? We don’t trust it anymore. We don’t have even a faux-belief in politicians.”

“The world is spiralling to a place out of our control. There’s an increased experience of generalized anxiety.”

Inglis’s proposition is that “small-scale theatre sustains and enlivens the theatre ecology in this country” in ways the big guys don’t. And in an age where the indies rarely tour, she says, Anxiety “is a sweet spot for collaboration to make sense.”

Toronto’s Outside The March received this photo album as part of Anxiety.dbphotographics

CREATING ANXIETY

In its seven-year life, Outside The March, an innovative “site-engaging” Toronto indie company, has invited audiences into immersive theatre experiences in abandoned schools, garages, parades, even out on a 911 paramedic call.TheatreYes’sAnxietyproposition was a perfectfit.

Director Ali Joy Richardson had already said Yes to Anxiety when she rode her bike across town to meet up with Outside The March artistic director Mitchell Cushman last May. Together they opened a mystery package from Theatre Yes, containing a vintage photo album with all the photos torn out, along with a page torn out of a journal, and an envelope of ashes of burnt pictures.

Intriguingly, “the look of the album is antique, but the voice felt very contemporary,” says Richardson, who will arrive in Edmonton with designer Amanda Wong. “From all the scribbled notes and snatches of poetry, I got a sense of a mother/daughter relationship.”

They played with the clues. From the scientific equations scrawled in the album came “the idea that the mother was some sort of scientist. Because of the to-do lists, thoughts about memory. How we remember, how we forget.” Mother + Memory is at the centre of their creation.

“We got the album for 25 bucks at an antique mall,” says Theatre Yes’s Inglis. “It felt so creepy that someone had violently ripped out the pictures…. A loss of memory? Violence happening to the past? It looked kinda old; we guessed the ’50s.” In an Antiques Roadshow initiative, later they took the album to Beck’s Antiques, to discover that it was from the 1890s.

• In Saskatoon, Joey Tremblay, the new artistic director of the experimental performance company Curtain Razors, opened a large mailing tube full of maps: “all kinds of them, LRT maps, maps of constellations in transparencies that look like X-rays. “

“Maps are supposed to ease your anxiety,” says Tremblay, a former co-artistic director of Catalyst Theatre well known to Edmonton audiences for such performance creation pieces as Elephant Wake. “In the immediate sense, they point to our frail little human attempts to locate ourselves, to feel like we know our place. In the larger sense all maps lead to one place, death.”

Thoughts of that sort were “on my brain,” laughs Tremblay who, coincidentally, was testing out a new full-length performance play of his own. Bad Blood is, he says, “a (black comedy) response to my health-care crisis of seven years ago,” a horrific story of medical bungling and its escalating consequences. “I nearly died several times and went through the process of saying goodbye so many times I was becoming a Molière play. Insane!”

“People visiting you are terrified!” says Tremblay. “Everything is telling them to get the hell out, versus their conscience, their duty.” He used “the tension, the anxiety that hospital visiting creates” for his Anxiety contribution. “The ultimate source, if you trace it back, is fear of death.”

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